the values voters breakout sessions
Obviously, these issues are being concretized in a way that’s pretty inflammatory [black and white]. In a discussion elsewhere, I found myself pondering the first – THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. I don’t know much about that. If there’s an agenda, I expect it’s to support homosexual kids and to keep them from being demonized as has been the case forever. I expect that almost anyone who accepts that homosexuality is innate would agree that it is important for gay adolescents to have the freedom to include their sexual orientation in the important task of identity formation instead of leaving it out.
But that’s not what these values voters are talking about. I think they’re talking about their notion of recruitment – that homosexuals want to "recruit" kids into homosexuality. In this scenario, homosexuals are like the vampires in those vampire movies that are in vogue right now – predators out to create a world in their own twisted image. Most of us think that’s a crazy idea [speaking of demonizing]. I certainly think it’s crazy, so I find myself musing about why they think such a thing. Many people interpret this obsessive homophobia as a way of warding off their own repressed homosexual impulses. Others see it as a weak masculine identification.
It has the same sound as the delusional ideas seen in the illness – Schizophrenia. The classic Paranoid Schizophrenic feels persecuted by some group that is trying to change them, to "take away" some essential part of them. Their ideas usually involve the belief that there is a conspiracy group [we call the pseudocommunity] working through some medium [the influence machine]. The motives attributed to the group are uniformly evil [satanic].
Obviously, the mental forces in the mind of Schizophrenic people are not only found there. They’re regularly seen in large groups. In former times, it was witches. More recently Jews, Communists, Moslems, Infidels, Blacks, Whites, Catholics, Christians, etc. have filled the need for a Satanic enemy. In the list above, homosexuals are accompanied by others: Obama, the proponents of Global Warming, the left wing "pseudocommunity." So I question the "repressed homosexual" theory, because almost any group can be engaged in this kind of black and white paranoid thinking.
And it can go both ways. It’s very easy for me [or maybe you] to see these "values voters" in black and white terms – as crazy people with evil intent. It is the nature of human thought to simplify others into black or white, good and evil, friend or foe, like the mono-dimensional characters in action movies – Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader, Batman and the Joker, Hopalong Cassidy and the Rustlers. The list is endless.
The only antidote to this destructive trend in human group-think is an encounter with people on the other side – some personal experience that disproves the demonic simplifications. Such things are hard to arrange in the current climate. It’s what Obama was getting at with the "beer in the garden" meeting between Henry Louis Gates and his arresting officer. It’s part of the idea behind integration, insisting on racial encounter to neutralize racism. But the forces working against such encounter are powerful, and, at the moment, have the upper hand. The very emotion that lies underneath all of this fosters "apartness." That emotion is fear…
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